Hungary has been a member of WHO since it was established on 7 April 1948 with an intermission between 1949–1954, when all countries of the “Eastern Bloc” withdrew from their membership following the order of the Soviet Union. Since 1954 there has been a progressive cooperation between Hungary and WHO, becoming quite intense from the 1960s. Moreover, three of the European Regional Committee’s presidents were Hungarian (1969, 1988 and... Read more ...

1. The political influence of the European Union
In the nineties, Hungary was repeatedly warmed by international organizations such as the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI, 2000/5., Par. 29.) and the UN Committee on the elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD, 2002, Par. 382.) for the educational discrimination of the Roma. Yet the European accession was exploited in communicative terms but did not mean a real pressure factor.
“Hungary joined the EU in 2004.... Read more ...

Mental Health Declaration and Action Plan had regulatory effects on the national level, since an issue that had formerly been absent from the national agenda has been brought up, partly as a result of the formal collaboration between WHO and Hungary, but mainly as a result of self-regulation, i.e. the European/international ‘language’ of mental health policy was adopted partly as a way of conformity, partly as a rational step in the hope of funding... Read more ...

In Europe, information and expertise are now both more widely distributed and more readily accessible than ever before. At the same time, expectations of transparency and public accountability have increased. In many ways, knowledge is coming to play a new role in policy: we can now distinguish ’post-bureaucratic’ from conventional ’bureaucratic’ regimes and show that each presupposes a specific kind of knowledge and a specific way of using it. While bureaucratic modes of governance require ‘established’ bodies of knowledge to be translated into ‘vertical’ regulations; post-bureaucratic modes of governance consist rather in attempting to turn actors’ autonomy and reflexivity into a means of governing.